In recent years, portable terminals have become widespread in their use by enabling wireless voice calls and other general information exchange. With early portable terminals, it was generally recognized that these portable terminals could be designed to be relatively portable. However, with the development of various technologies, such as the introduction of wireless Internet, the portable terminal's utility has significantly increased in scope, considering the increased functionalities such as gaming, remote control using local area communications (LANs), image capturing by installed digital cameras, and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) functionality, in addition to its initial functionality of providing audio phone call services.
WLAN functionality generally provides a communication service such as the Internet for a portable terminal (e.g., a Portable Digital Assistant (PDA), a notebook computer, and the like) that may be located within a predetermined distance from an Access Point (AP). Initially WLAN devices had a propagation range of only 10 meters but, recently, has been expanded up to 50 meters to several hundreds meters. A transmission speed of WLAN has also been improved, so it was made possible to transmit/receive a large capacity of multimedia information.
To use the WLAN function, the portable terminal typically establish a network connection procedure with a peripheral terminal.
To establish the network connection procedure, the portable terminal typically performs many processes, which may include a process of searching and connecting to a wireless network, a process of inputting a network address, and a process of configuring security information.
Unlike a general computer, the portable terminal has a limited size of output screen having a limited size such that it may only provide a limited amount of visual content. So, the portable terminal generally performs more procedures than the general computer, which in certain cases, may cause an inconvenience. The portable terminal often uses protocols and/or parameters, such as a Service Set IDentifier (SSID), an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), a Domain Name System (DNS), a subnet, a gateway, a Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), an Ad Hoc, an AP and the like. In this respect, a user not familiar to network configuration suffers a great difficulty in the network configuration.
At network configuration, a user of the portable terminal should input information that may include a combination of many characters and numbers. So, another problem may exist that, using multiple key input sequences, erroneous characters may be input thus causing a failure of network connection.
In addition, a problem typically occurs that security information leaks out to other people because the user identifies security information necessary for the network connection through vocal communication that may be overheard by others.